The return of Bad Newt

The all-too-familiar character from the 1990s has only peeked out in public a handful of times so far. But already, Newt Gingrich — flush with pride over new polls showing his left-for-dead candidacy now leading the pack — is letting his healthy ego roam free again, littering the campaign trail with grand pronouncements about his celebrity, his significance in political history and his ability to transform America.

Story Continued Below

“I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress,” Gingrich said this week on Sean Hannity’s show.

“I’m going to be the nominee,” he informed ABC News while in Iowa.

“I was charging $60,000 a speech and the number of speeches was going up, not down,” Gingrich said in South Carolina, explaining why he didn’t actually need his consulting fee from Freddie Mac. “Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”

“The degree to which I challenge the establishment and the degree to which I’m willing to follow ideas and solutions to their natural consequence without regard to Republican or Democratic political correctness makes me probably the most experienced outsider in modern times,” he told Radio Iowa.

Even descriptions of his wife Callista fall prey to aggrandizement: “She actually describes herself as being a cross between Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush with just a slight bit of Jackie Kennedy tossed in and I think there is, somewhere swirling in there, the model Callista would like to live up to.”

The economy? There’s a vainglorious boast for that, too.

“Obama is now 34 months into his presidency, and the economy has lost 1.9 million total jobs since he took office. At the same point in the Gingrich speakership (November 1997), Americans had created 303,000 jobs in one month alone, and had created 7.7 million total new jobs since he became speaker. This is an ‘Obama-Gingrich jobs gap” of 9.5 million,” the former congressman said in a statement.

Longtime Gingrich watchers see clear signs that “Good Newt” (disciplined, charming, expansive in personality and intellect) is engaging in an internal battle with “Bad Newt” (off-message, bombastic, self-wounding) as his political fortunes rise.

“Remember, this is the man of the combination of Churchill and de Gaulle to begin with,” conservative columnist George Will told radio host Laura Ingraham. “He’s the embodiment of a nation in deep peril. The stage has to be lit by the fires of crisis and grandeur to suit Newt Gingrich.”

“Gingrich [is] always a fine a line between charming and brilliant on one hand, and eccentric and borderline dangerous on the other,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “He’s been ‘Charming Newt’ for the last several weeks. But the last couple of days have been a reminder of his other side.”